Unofficial news and tips about Google

February 10, 2009

Merge Gmail Contacts

The feature is not yet automatic, so you need to find the contacts you want to merge, but it's useful if you don't have too many duplicates. Just select two or more entries for the same person, click on "Merge these contacts" and Google will combine the information from the selected contacts.

All the email addresses from the merged contacts will continue to be available in the auto-complete feature, so you'll still be able to choose one of the addresses.

Update: To make things even more confusing, Gmail added a new view titled "All Contacts". So now you have:

* My Contacts - "a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that's important to you"* All Contacts - "these are all of your contacts"* Suggested Contacts - "the people you have contacted frequently"* Most Contacted - "contacts you email and chat with the most"

The descriptions are not clear enough to distinguish between all these views and I wonder if all of them are really necessary.